The Alarming Similarities Between Neuromancer and Contemporary America
A Philosophy of Exploitation
Dynamics of employment can vary greatly from country to country, and sometimes even from state to state. Some offer more worker protections, others looser employer restrictions. How to find a healthy balance between those two on the spectrum can be a difficult question to answer, and has societal repercussions. Legislators in the contemporary United States generally tend to favor the employer end of the spectrum, which leads to an unequal relationship between employers and employees. In Neuromancer, that tendency is taken to its logical extreme while also remaining within an alarmingly plausible outcome for the United States in real life.
The End Justifies the Means
When evaluating the philosophy of Neuromancer, one must consider how its society functions, how the characters behave, and how they treat one another. As I alluded to before, criticism of Capitalism is an inherent aspect of the Cyberpunk genre, and we see this in Gibson’s novel. One way to criticize capitalism is to attack its elitist-Consequentialist approach to society, where the end product supersedes the means used to reach it. This means that, for the elite who run the economy and corporations, employees are but tools to accomplish the ultimate capitalist goal, namely the maximization of profits. The philosophical school that is often placed in contrast to Consequentialism is Immanuel Kant's Deontology, which suggests that people are inherently valuable, thus we must treat people as ends in themselves.We can see examples of these philosophies applied by the characters throughout the novel. When Corto has fully manifested and is about to be discarded by Wintermute, who does so because Corto is no longer useful to him, Case protests. The life of his fellow man, though wretched and bleak, is worth preserving. Similarly, the incident that gave Corto severe PTSD in the first place. Instead of aborting the doomed mission, those in central command thought it useful to proceed anyway, and send the squadron to their deaths just to test out the Soviet defense system, without informing the men.
This philosophy of exploitation also works on an individual level, and is not necessarily limited to a specific class. Take Hideo, the Tessier-Ashpool assassin, for example. Preserved in cryo-sleep until he is needed, he is then awakened and once his task is complete, returned to stasis. His life literally revolves around his work, he gets no free time, no opportunities, and is single-mindedly driven by his task.Towards the end of the novel, we learn that Corto is also the victim of manipulation and exploitation by Wintermute. His whole persona was created with a single goal in mind, and once that goal was achieved he was discarded. Yet, some factions broke off from this dichotomy, such as the Rastafarians led by the Elders of Zion. While little is told about their society, the founders were workers who had a job to do on a space station, but decided not to return to Earth.
Work or Die
Early in the story we are told that Case had been injured by his former employers and could not work as a hacker anymore due to a toxin used on him, severely damaging his central nervous system and preventing him from jacking into cyberspace. Armitage then made a deal with Case, and offered to have him cured in return for the completion of a job. However, Armitage secretly had his doctors implant sacs full of that same toxin, which would deteriorate over time, rendering him once again unable to jack into cyberspace. Armitage would only have them removed if Case finished the job for him. This form of coercion was meant to ensure that Case remained compliant and accomplished his task as, akin to Damocles' Sword hanging over his head by a single strand of hair, these sacs loomed over him for the entire story. From a Deontological perspective, Case is being used as a means to an end, he found himself on the wrong side of the wealth divide.
This relationship is strikingly similar to how employment is set up in the United States today, as healthcare is usually tied to employment. Thus, when a person loses their job they also lose access to their healthcare, which often extends to the person’s household. Paired with the at-will employment doctrine, which means that employers can terminate employment for any reason and at any time (so long as it is not for illegal reasons), it creates a heavily skewed relationship in favor of employers. Those who find themselves in this kind of relationship often experience a form of “employment-lock." But suppose an employer terminates employment for an illegal reason, the fired employee might no longer have the resources and time to dedicate towards a lawsuit. Having lost both their income and healthcare coverage in one fell swoop, many might find themselves unable to do anything about it, as lawsuits are both expensive and time consuming. This highlights the ugly underbelly of a deeply imperfect legal system, namely that a rich party can drown a poor opposing party in motions until they run out of money to pay their legal fees.
A Two-tiered Society
As we have seen earlier, today in the United States healthcare is usually tied to employment. Alternatives do exist, such as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) expanding Medicaid to individuals below a certain income, but the ACA, passed by President Barack Obama has consistently been under attack by conservative politicians and lobbyists, and most recently by the Trump administration. Consequently, it is hard to analyze American society today without concluding that it is this way by design, with the intent of making sure the working class has little to no alternatives other than to keep working long hours for low wages for fear of incurring ruinous amounts of medical debt. Perhaps the different kinds of entertainment described in Neuromancer are still symbolic and not quite true to reality yet. But there is a burgeoning feeling of resentment, and that society is divided between the One Percent and the rest. On the issue of healthcare alone, the growing resentment towards the elite who run health insurance companies eventually led to the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4, 2024 by the alleged murderer Luigi Mangione. While many condemn the act, others have openly defended him and taken sympathy in the alleged act in defiance of an unnecessarily complicated healthcare system deemed unjust.
The All-Powerful Dollar
It is unclear whether Capitalism inherently corrupts, or if humans in power tend to want more power no matter what economic system is in place; such a question goes beyond the scope of this paper. What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that the ultimate goal of a capitalist society is seemingly to amass vast amounts of wealth and ensure that investments made by shareholders bear fruit. The flaw of this system is that it creates a two-tiered society based on income and capital, and this problem took drastically bigger proportions following the infamous 2009 Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. The Court held that under the First Amendment corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited. In plain English, it meant that corporations could donate to a political candidate without imposed limitations. This had as a consequence truly outrageous amounts of money funneled to political campaigns through PACs and SuperPACs, with the 2020 Presidential election spending a staggering $14 billion. Adding corporation money to politics allowed for the rich elite to have an undue amount of influence on legislation over those who could only afford small donations, thus widening the divide of this two-tiered society.
Final Thoughts
If we do not heed the warnings William Gibson gave us through his novel, we will almost inevitably go headlong into that same dystopian society; one ruled by few at the expense of the many. Yanis Varoufakis, an economist and former Greece minister of finance, argues that we are entering an age of Technofeudalism, where Apple, Facebook, and Amazon have changed the economy so much that it now resembles Europe’s medieval feudal system with tech giants as the lords and the users are peasants doing the work to create revenue. In light of such an evolution,we would do well to remember that humans are ends in themselves, and not simply tools to achieve certain goals, only to be discarded afterwards.
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- Societal CYBERPUNK Adelmar Ramirez
